Hello,
A small voice from the distant past here.
I have a custom system using LinuxBIOS V1. Yes! 1! This is a PIII/440BX based system.
We have found that we can boot 2.6.23-17, but can not boot 2.6.24. Investigation using characters posted on the serial port suggest that we are starting the kernel and getting to about the point where the clock speed of the CPU and then it just stops as far as we can tell.
We've found that if we put in more output to the serial port, it dies earlier in the code. We can't be sure, bit it appears that it might be some sort of a time based problem. It dies after a certain amount of time and if we use that time by polling characters out the serial port, then we don't get as far through the code before death.
One thought that almost fits the facts is that a interrupt might be occurring and not handled properly. But it happens that the CPU clock speed code disables interrupts and this is where it is dying.
There seems to have been a number of changes in 2.6.24 to support booting kernels in virtual machines and to merge ia64 and ia32 under x86. Some notes were added about 32 bit boot loaders that reference LinuxBIOS. However, we've been unable to find what it is that we are doing wrong. We have grep'ed the internet and browsed through the CoreBoot email archives, but failed to find anything that might have been in either "place".
Anyone out there have any suggestions or know what happened during 2.6.24 development that might have changed the requirements for successfully starting a kernel?
Thanks! Ty